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Vegans In Vegas - A Finding We Won't Be Covering Today

Science 2.0 - Jan 24 2024 - 12:01
Las Vegas calls itself Sin City, but there are few sins actually available. Having a cigar after a steak? Banned. Prostitution? Banned. The only big sin still legal is Gluttony, and you will pay a lot for that one, while Greed is allowed but stupid if you can do math. The house is always going to win eventually.

Still, if you are going to be a glutton, you can at least do it quasi-ethically; by only eating plants. 



A new analysis of Vegas reveals the best places to go if you prefer to avoid a normal human diet, but if we believed that was sound science we'd endorse organic food and get some of that $3 billion per year in environmental trial lawyer money.

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Enneagram Numbers Are The New Psychology Craze of Rich White Women

Science 2.0 - Jan 23 2024 - 15:01
Pseudoscience often rebrands itself under new names but never really goes away. Some people not only believe in acupuncture, they even believe in acupuncture for their coffee grinds. Other things have even less evidence, like chakras, astrology, and their more modern weird love child, the Enneagram.

Like The Flu Fighter Martini, just because Enneagram numbers are in The Guardian, official media outlet of the anti-science left, does not make any of it legitimate.

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Not Just Humanities, Now Harvard Science Is Under Fire Also

Science 2.0 - Jan 23 2024 - 09:01
Harvard University is under cultural pressure, even from its own political tent, because its leader couldn't bring herself to condemn anti-Semitism, hate speech, and attacks on Jewish people by Harvard faculty and students. This would have been okay a few years ago, American progressives have long been opposed to Israel, but since Harvard targets microaggressions of all kinds, and 'stands with Ukraine' after the invasion by Russia, it was not just queasy but hypocritical.

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To MAGAs, The Constitution Isn’t The Point

Science 2.0 - Jan 23 2024 - 09:01

1.     January 6 was a shocking aberration.

2.     Whether due to term limit or a lost election, each US president up through Barak Obama, and each presidential candidate up through Al Gore, gracefully yielded when the time came, because that’s how the American system works.

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Safe: In Utero Exposure To Maternal COVID-19 Vaccination

Science 2.0 - Jan 22 2024 - 15:01
An analysis of 2,261 and 1,940 infants ages 12 and 18 months, respectively, found that COVID-19 vaccination during pregnancy had no impact on infant neurodevelopment. 

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Prepare For Kindergarten, Prepare For Life

Science 2.0 - Jan 22 2024 - 10:01
Children who had a successful first 10-14 weeks of kindergarten scored higher than others on tests of academic and social-behavioral skills at the end of the school year, according to a new demography paper. Important parts of the transition – what the scholars called a “big little leap” – included making new friends, learning to work with others and adapting to new academic demands.

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Comparing Student Reactions To Lectures In Artificial Intelligence And Physics

Science 2.0 - Jan 21 2024 - 11:01
In the past two weeks I visited two schools in Veneto to engage students with the topic of Artificial Intelligence, which is something everybody seems to be happy to hear about these days: on the 10th of January I visited a school in Vicenza, and on the 17th a school in Venice. In both cases there were about 50-60 students, but there was a crucial difference: while the school in Venezia (the "Liceo Marco Foscarini", where I have been giving lectures in the past within the project called "Art and Science") was a classical liceum and the high-schoolers who came to listen to my presentation were between 16 and 18 years old, the one in Vicenza was a middle school, and its attending students were between 11 and 13 years old. 

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The Link Between Stomach Woes And Bad Breath

Science 2.0 - Jan 19 2024 - 08:01
If you have bad breath and it hasn't been an issue your entire life, the most common cause may be that garlic and Limburger cheese sandwich you ate at lunch, but sometimes it's not a lifestyle issue. It could be an oral issue but it could also be a stomach one.

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China Lied About When It First Had The SARS-CoV-2 Virus Sequence

Science 2.0 - Jan 18 2024 - 18:01
In 2020, nearly 20,000 coronavirus samples in a database were removed by the Chinese government. Prior to that, I had noted a suspicious passing of a Chinese whistleblower, Li Wenliang, who had been arrested by the government and suddenly died.

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Republicans Are Still Too New to the Anti-Vax Ecosystem To Have A Hugh Fudenberg

Science 2.0 - Jan 18 2024 - 13:01
Republicans are still pretty new to the anti-vax ecosystem. Sure, decades ago there were some religious fundamentalists who denied vaccines, but when progressive states like California, Washington, and Oregon led the nation by far - the California coast actually had more arbitrary school kid exemptions than the entire US combined - more conservative states like Mississippi and Alabama had vaccines for kids at nearly 100 percent.

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The Biden Administration Needs To Fund The Agricultural Foreign Investment Disclosure Act of 1978

Science 2.0 - Jan 18 2024 - 13:01
The US Department of Agriculture believes that foreign countries may own up to 40,000,000 acres of farm land.

No one really knows despite the Agricultural Foreign Investment Disclosure Act of 1978 requiring it. 

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Electric Car Sales Are Plummeting Due To Reduced Subsidies - Cold Weather Will Make Sales Worse

Science 2.0 - Jan 17 2024 - 16:01
Like most of the Biden economic initiatives during his first term, the Inflation Reduction Act, along with trillions of dollars of other subsidies, were primarily geared toward wealthy elites.

If you want to buy a fancy electric car, government, using taxes and fees on poor people, will pay you to do so. They pay car companies to make them and mandate car companies had to make them.

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California Democrats Vow To Help Prevent Childhood Obesity With More Government - By Banning Sports

Science 2.0 - Jan 17 2024 - 12:01
California Democrats: Childhood obesity is up, we need more government regulations to protect people from themselves.

Also California Democrats: Let's start by banning sports for kids.

By the end of this month, California Democrats will decide if they should ban youth football. Sports are dangerous. It's for the children.

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Suspect Correlation: Epidemiologists Link IVF To BMI Of Kids

Science 2.0 - Jan 17 2024 - 10:01
A population-based cohort study sought to examine a controversial epidemiological claim about assisted reproductive technologies like in vitro fertilization and the body mass index (BMI) of children.

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Federal Scientists Did Not Say Marijuana Is Medicine, Epidemiologists Did

Science 2.0 - Jan 16 2024 - 17:01
Marijuana industry trade groups are ecstatic that a Department of Health and Human Services report  stated there is one indication that medical marijuana is legitimate.

But news outlets reporting that federal scientists are saying medical marijuana is legitimate are doing the public a disservice; it was not scientists, it was epidemiologists, and the review was of papers where people anecdotally said it helped them feel less pain.


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Thermodynamic Parameters Can Influence The Outcome Of An Experiment

Science 2.0 - Jan 15 2024 - 17:01
When you are making a model it is common to make assumptions about the physical systems often assume that measurable features of the system. Temperature or chemical potential can be specified. The real world is messier than that, and uncertainty is unavoidable. Temperatures fluctuate, instruments malfunction, the environment interferes, and systems evolve over time.

Statistical physics address the uncertainty about the state of a system that arises when that system interacts with its environment but a new paper says that uncertainty in the thermodynamic parameters themselves — built into equations that govern the energetic behavior of the system — may also influence the outcome of an experiment.

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The Harvard Anti-Semitism Controversy Also Revealed The Scholarship Cancer Inside Academia

Science 2.0 - Jan 15 2024 - 16:01
University of Kentucky political science Professor Stephen Voss, who was plagiarized by Harvard President Claudine Gay, said it was no big deal. It was even expected she would use his work without attribution? He seems to think so. “It would have been quite natural for her to borrow ideas from me."

He didn't tell me that personally. I instead cited the source. Like you are supposed to do. It ain't that hard. She could have done it but did not, and yet he has no issue with that. He seems to be more upset that her plagiarism is going to lead to more investigations of humanities scholars' academic work, including by people 'not qualified' to do so.

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Resilience: Debunking The Debunker

Science 2.0 - Jan 15 2024 - 10:01

Sarah Green Carmichael, in a Bloomberg News item titled “You don’t need more resilience, you need friends, and money” debunks the business gurus who tell us all resilience comes from inside us. Sarah’s thesis is that our environments determine our resilience, or at least can shield us from the traumas that necessitate resilience.

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Statistical Methods For Fundamental Science Course Starts Tomorrow

Science 2.0 - Jan 14 2024 - 06:01
From tomorrow onwards (once or twice a week until February 5), I will be giving an online course on the topic of "Statistical Methods for Fundamental Science" for the INSTATS organization. This is a 5-day, 15-hour set of lectures that I put together to suit the needs of students and researchers who work in any scientific discipline, who wish to improve their understanding and practice of statistical methods for data analysis.

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